My Kindle (one of the third-generation ones with a keyboard) slid off an end table this weekend and, despite being in its protective case, managed to hit the floor exactly wrong, breaking the display. Looking at the current lineup of e-ink books on the market, I decided to try the Kobo Glo, which had reviewers comparing it favorably to the Kindle Paperwhite, if only it had access to Amazon’s ecosystem. I’m not locked into the Amazon ecosystem, so that wasn’t really a consideration for me, and I liked the better format support the Kobo offered. So I bought one.

Well, first I spent an hour trying to find any online vendors to sell me one. Everyone was either out of stock or listing it as a pre-order, or didn’t list the Glo as an available model. It turns out that if you want a Kobo Glo, what you should do is call your local independent bookstore. The one right down the street from me had them in stock, and set one aside for me.

My initial impressions are pretty favorable. I was expecting to miss the hardware page turn buttons, but the touch screen works well enough that I find that’s not an issue. I love the … it’s not a backlight, but I don’t know what to call it. The lighting, whatever you call it, works really well. It might be nice to be able to dim it one more notch, as the lowest illumination is fairly bright in a dark room, but that’s a minor quibble. I like the size and weight; it has enough grip that I don’t feel it’s going to slide out of my hands, but it’s not overly sticky. I’ll have to see what kind of cases are available for it.

The on-screen keyboard works surprisingly well for finding books — I immediately loaded a few dozen (using Calibre) and was able to find any book I wanted with just a few taps. That’s an improvement over the Kindle 3, definitely. In general, this is just a snappier device than the old Kindle — pages turn more quickly, navigation is easier, the full page refresh interval is customizable. I do miss the Kindle’s indicator bar with chapter markers — on books purchased from Kobo you can get a per-chapter page count, so you know how far you are from the end of a chapter, but on books purchased elsewhere you just get a total page count.

The biggest issue is that Kobo-purchased books render differently on the Glo and in the iPad Kobo app. And the iPad app is the one that gets it right. I’ve got a question in to Kobo’s customer support about whether this is a known issue with all purchased books, or if I just happened to buy two with formatting problems. But the fact that the Adobe Digital Editions player and the iPad app render these two books correctly while the Glo and the Kobo desktop player don’t is problematic. It’s not a huge deal for me, since if I strip the DRM off the ADE version of the book, the Glo renders that one properly. But if I weren’t able to do that, this would be a deal breaker for me. If a book has sections indicated by extra line breaks between paragraphs, and the e-book is flattening those out by inserting the same amount of space between every paragraph, that’s a real problem.

I’ll see what I hear back from Kobo about that. Otherwise, though, so far I’m liking the Glo. I recognize that I am probably not a representative customer, though — I don’t really care about what any vendor’s ecosystem offers me in the way of synchronizing bookmarks and annotations between devices, for example, and I know how to strip the DRM off of purchased ebooks so I can read them on whatever device I want. If I have to use the stripped and un-synchronizable versions of purchased books to get the right formatting, that’s fine with me; that’s my normal process anyway.

Read 2 comments

Hrm. Their initial response was to thank me for my new feature request, and tell me they’d pass it along to the development team. I’m not sure “books I purchase from you should display the same whether I load them onto the device using your software or using Adobe’s software” is a feature request, so much as a bug report. I’ve clarified my report and sent them more details.

they’d pass it along to the development team. I’m not sure “books I purchase from you should display the same whether I load them onto the device using your software or using Adobe’s software” is a feature request, so much as a bug report. I’ve clarified my report and sent them more details.